Versatzstücke / Kommen und Gehen / Rekurs / Fallstudien

Orm Finnendahl is no musical humorist. But his works are often based on punchline-like expressions which take the listener by surprise whenever he believed himself safe.
"Fallstudien" is not the first piece in which Finnendahl works consistently with procedures derived from mathematics and the natural sciences. Especially important to him are recursions, patterns of growth and diversification generated by the repeated application of one and the same rule to pre-existing material and to the results thereby obtained. One of the most celebrated examples of recursive patterns are fractals, which can be used, say, to describe the abstract formation of a snowflake using a single rule.
In "Rekurs", sections of the work are recorded on tape and fed into the next section via loudspeakers. The tape recorder embodies the contradiction between technological progress and the fixed immutability of the recording – a contradiction that Finnendahl expounds and subsumes in his art, most notably in "Rekurs".
Rules and pre-existing material must first be transformed before they can produce connections – poetic or dramatic, for example – that catch the composer's interest. To quote Finnendahl himself, "Interpretation is made visible as contingent action on the part of the composer."